A discussion with Bobby Derie, AKA /u/AncientHistory
Bobby Derie is a self-described “independent scholar, weirdfinder, reader of dead men’s letters, focusing especially on pulp fiction and authors, particularly H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard.” He is the author of Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014) and Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019), as well as the owner of the blog Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein. He was kind enough to spend time answering some questions I had about his 2014 book, and more general questions regarding Lovecraft, worldbuilding, sex, The Shape of Water, August Derleth, Lovecraftian esoterica, and more!
Mr. Derie, thank you for providing me with the opportunity to discuss your book, Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos, worldbuilding, and fiction in general. Your book is a very well-structured, informative, and ‘meaty’ — if you pardon the pun — window into Lovecraft and how his personal beliefs filtered into his works. Although the subject matter of Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos may be considered taboo, your research on the topic is illuminating. The first section, which delves into the life and character of Lovecraft himself, will, no doubt, be invaluable for future biographers. Your book should provide readers with a lot of food for thought, as it did to me.
In my opinion, one of the more enlightening points that you make in your book is that “the arcane literature of the Lovecraft Mythos features many of the same basic traits as pornography in the United States of the 1920 and ‘30s — hidden from the public, suppressed or kept under lock and key by intelligent men, not talked about openly, prone to disgust from the uninitiated, passed around in secret by groups of degenerates, amassed by loners in terrible libraries, yet a subject of abiding and frenzied interest (…) [Lovecraft’s] penchant for tantalizing and seductive hints rather than outright revelation or denial creates an intellectual burlesque that readers and protagonists endure.”
In that vein, what would you make of such ‘fan’ works as the Lovecraft Encyclopedia, Lin Carter’s H.P. Lovecraft: The Books and The Gods, or of Ex Libris Miskatonici by Joan C. Stanley? Are these efforts engaging in the ‘intellectual burlesque’ or circumventing it to access the ‘raw,’ taboo knowledge which underpins the Mythos?
The pornography metaphor breaks down a little, but only a little. Once you move beyond treating the material as forbidden or taboo, it becomes just another dry set of facts. Lin Carter becomes not Hugh Hefner or Larry Flynt, but Leopold von Sacher-Masoch or Alfred Kinsey. Stripped of its mystery, sex and the Mythos become a bit less glamorous. The more fictional approach in Ex Libris Miskatonici strikes a bit of a middle ground, since even as it catalogues and categorizes it still retains a few hints and suggestions of mysteries yet unveiled and dots still unconnected.
Later on in the text, you also make the observation that “old and familiar pleasures do not have quite the same thrill, and new or more intense material may be required to obtain the same satisfaction (…) later writers favor more direct stories and develop in detail what Lovecraft would have left discreet or implicit.” Would you qualify this drive toward more ‘direct’ or ‘intense’ material as a literary or fantastical ‘hedonic treadmill?’
BD: Pretty much. I like Terry Pratchett’s metaphor of Horseradish Sauce Syndrome in Making Money. You can only ever have the revelation in The Dunwich Horror or The Shadow over Innsmouth once. While you can still enjoy those stories on subsequent readings, you can’t ever re-experience that same peeling-back-of-the-onion effect — nor would it be entirely satisfying to simply rehash the plot, as many pasticheurs have discovered. So I think there is really a strong urge among later Mythos writers to ‘chase the dragon’— which doesn’t always mean more gore or more sex, but pushing for more revelations or new perspectives.
Do you think that this understanding of literary or fantastical ‘desire’ for knowledge, especially fictional knowledge, could explain the increasing popularity of worldbuilding, and setting-construction?
BD: Desktop publishing has greatly reduced the amount of effort to produce new material; the internet has vastly increased the ability of fans to get in contact with one another and share new material. If you think about all the supplementary materials that fans produced for The Lord of the Rings or the Cthulhu Mythos back in the days when you had to mimeograph fanzines by hand, the potential energy barrier for new creative works, speculation, and worldbuilding has never been lower.
On top of which, there was a huge push for worldbuilding in the late 60s/early 70s, with Lin Carter’s triptych Tolkien: A Look Behind “The Lord of the Rings” (1969), Lovecraft: A Look Behind The Cthulhu Mythos (1972), and Imaginary Worlds: the Art of Fantasy (1973) which really emphasize how much worldbuilding became a kind of driving force in contemporary fantasy to an extent that wasn’t the case before WWII.
Throughout the book you discuss how Lovecraft was not alien to sex, but fully aware of it. The impression I got was that Lovecraft, as a gentleman, preferred not to discuss the topic — although, with time and a marriage, he grew to be more tolerant of it — he only used sex and gender to service the ‘weird’ element of his fiction.
However, you also say that “the intention of the author and the conception of the reader must strike a balance.” This made me curious to hear what your thoughts are on the current ‘balance’ in between author intention and reader conception: clearly, the sexual and gender elements of Lovecraft have had their lines of thought extended. Is there any ‘balance’ that needs to be pursued by the current Mythos readers or writers? Is ‘balance’ an attempt to rein in these elements in to service the weird fiction, or does Lovecraft’s literary disinclination to sex and gender require corrective action?
BD: Language is an imperfect means of communication. Authorial intent only goes so far as what they explicitly state on the page. How readers react to and interpret what they read, see, and hear is entirely their own province. So just because Lovecraft didn’t write any bedroom scenes in his Mythos stories doesn’t mean that readers can’t interpret his stories to have lots of sex in them. The balance that has to be struck is trying to differentiate between authorial intent in a text, as far as it can be construed, and how that same text is often received.
A good case in point is probably the name of the cat in The Rats in the Walls. Today, this is often popularly considered a horrible example of Lovecraft’s racism — he named the cat the N-word! Not just a racial pejorative but one of the worst racial pejoratives in a contemporary American context. The name of the cat was the whole reason that editor Xavier Aldana Reyes left The Rats in the Walls out of the collection The Gothic Stories of H. P. Lovecraft (2018). It has become one of the go-to examples of Lovecraft’s racism.
It is true that Lovecraft was racist. It is true that the cat’s name is a racial pejorative. However, the nature of the name in the context of Lovecraft’s life and its use in the story don’t actually support the popular conception. In the late 19th/early 20th century, the N-word was not always considered as pejorative as it is today, and was in common use in many context — including pet names. Lovecraft was one of many people that used the N-word to refer to black cats and other pets, and the name of the cat in the story was borrowed from his own childhood pet. That is the full extent of the cat’s name in The Rats in the Walls: a descriptor for a black cat that recalls Lovecraft’s own beloved lost feline… and nobody during his lifetime appears to have had a problem with it, which in itself says something about the ubiquity of the term.
Does that make the cat’s name okay today? No. In many contemporary translations of the work to other languages, the cat’s name is changed to something like “Blackie” or “Black Tom.” Yet it should be understood like the N-word in Huckleberry Finn: an example of the ubiquity of racial pejoratives in Lovecraft’s time. Not to be emulated, but to be understood in that context.
Sex is generally less contentious, just because there’s nothing explicit in Lovecraft’s writings, sexual attitudes have in general opened up to be more permissive, and because the Mythos is so open-ended that everyone can develop things as they see fit. If you write a sexually explicit scene between Cthulhu and your original character, there’s probably going to be more folks upset about the sexually explicit part than that Cthulhu is involved.
The first time I was ever exposed to ‘Death of the Author,’ it was in the context of separating art and artist when the artist is of dubious or objectionable moral character — such as Woody Allen or more recently JK Rowling. The problem here is that Woody Allen is so entrenched in his own work, Rowling is now famous for inserting paratextual elements presented as narrative fact post-publication, and both creators are still alive and profiting from the consumption of their work; it is not really possible to remove the author from the text, if indeed it is possible to remove any author from any text. Which brings us to Lovecraft: many people have taken issue with the personal views he’s espoused in his life. His racism is at times deployed by his detractors as a sort of critical trump card. Readers can refuse to read a text for any reason — if the cover is ugly, if it has bad reviews on Amazon, or — of course — because the author was a known racist. However, if this criticism of Lovecraft-the-man is used to disparage the body of his work and discourage readership, what defense can be mounted in response?
BD: Never defend racism. Never defend Lovecraft’s racism. Never deny it. Lovecraft was racist. Full stop. If people don’t want to read Lovecraft because he was racist, that is fair enough. Their choice. Now, there are many good reasons to read Lovecraft despite his racism. Many of his stories are excellent, and he has had huge impact on weird fiction, horror, and fantasy, as well as roleplaying and worldbuilding in general. The Cthulhu Mythos is one of the largest, most established, and accessible shared universes in existence, and because pretty much all of Lovecraft’s fiction is in the public domain, it is very tempting and easy for people to use it. Using it well requires reading Lovecraft.
A lot of fans get defensive about Lovecraft when people accuse him of racism. This is especially true as a lot of the claims about Lovecraft’s racism are exaggerated, inaccurate, or poorly made; folks tend to knee-jerk to his defense. This is an instinct that should be resisted. Lovecraft was racist, and that racism itself should never be defended. Yes, it is true that racism was rampant during Lovecraft’s lifetime — he lived during the nadir of race relations in the United States, when segregation was legal, when anti-immigration bias and antisemitism was rampant; he saw the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi party, and while he himself never participated in a lynching or othe racial violence, it’s damning with faint praise if the best you can say of Lovecraft is that he never personally assaulted an African-American. Fans should never get into the game of trying to figure out if Lovecraft was more or less racist than his contemporaries, because the answer is both. Lovecraft was friends with James F. Morton, who was an early member of the NAACP and wrote a tract against race prejudice, and Lovecraft was friends with Robert E. Howard, who shared most of the same racial prejudices he did. Both men published in Weird Tales, which had the n-word in its pages from the first issue.
So… don’t try to defend Lovecraft. Try something harder: understanding the context in which his fiction was written, his worlds built. What influenced Lovecraft? How did Lovecraft influence those who came after? When you look at the idea of fantasy ‘races,’ that’s coming out of the late 19th/early 20th century racialism that was being drawn on by writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. P. Lovecraft, and J. R. R. Tolkien. They weren’t writing this stuff in a bubble.
Ideally Lovecraft’s critics would engage with the actual text — however, I would dare say that acknowledgment of Lovecraft’s racism is essential for reading at least some, if not all, of his work. It cannot be divorced from the text. Is replacing criticism of the work with criticism of the author a valid lens through which to approach a text in this case? How does one engage with this sort of critic without downplaying the extent of Lovecraft’s bigotry?Is it a good argument to remark that the author is literally dead and does not profit from your enjoyment of his work?
A lot of the criticism of racism in Lovecraft’s fiction is based on very superficial readings. When you read a popular criticism article on racism and Lovecraft, for example, you’re probably going to get some pearl-clutching about the name of the cat in The Rats in the Walls. If you were reading that story with no knowledge of Lovecraft, the name of the cat would be immediately weird and probably distressing to readers today, because the N-word is so rare and has become taboo. In a historical context, I’ve never read a single comment where anyone commented on the name of the cat in the 1920s or 30s. It’s not that the N-word wasn’t a pejorative, but it was in incredibly common use for a long time that the use of its in a pet’s name was unremarkable.
To give an example, Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel titled And Then There Were None in the United States was originally published in the United Kingdom as Ten Little Niggers — and that spelling stuck until 1985 in certain editions. So this is a case where you don’t need to know anything about the author, you just need to understand the historical context. Like Huckleberry Finn, it was written in a time and place where the N-word was in the common vernacular.
Of course, if you do know something about the author, it gets more interesting, because then you learn that Lovecraft named the cat in the story after his childhood pet — his last pet, which disappeared the year his grandfather died and the family fortunes tanked — one of his last happy memories of childhood, forever enshrined in one of his stories.
Most folks don’t dig deeper than that — but you can go deeper. Many people during the 1920s and 30s (and even up to the present day in certain parts of the US) use the ‘n-word’ to designate any black cat. Lovecraft was no exception. So yes, the name of the cat is racist, but it’s not racist in any allegorical pejorative sense — it’s racist because at the time and place it was written, there was the practice of using a racist pejorative as a name for pets, and Lovecraft was one of the people that did that. It’s racist in the same way blackface or minstrel songs are racist: the kind of openly casual racism which is appalling today, but was openly accepted for a very long time in the United States.
Which is probably a lot more than you wanted, but it’s an example of what I’m talking about. Someone that decries the cat’s name as an example of Lovecraft’s racism isn’t entirely wrong, but not for the reasons they probably think. Lovecraft didn’t just throw it in there because he loved saying the N-word so much or anything like that.
Lovecraft being dead tends to tie into the ‘cancel culture’ aspect of things. Part of cancel culture is to deny space to creators who hold, support, or express certain views as a way to stop the spread of those ideas — and, for living creators, to put financial pressure on them by not buying them or supporting their products. Which is a perfectly legitimate tactic. However, Lovecraft isn’t just dead he’s in the public domain, so that particular tactic has much less effectiveness than it does on a living creator. Lovecraft cannot recant his views or change; they are forever fixed. You can apply financial pressure to the thousands of people who continue to write Mythos fiction, produce Lovecraft/Mythos merch, or republish his fiction — but that includes many women, people of color, LGBTQ+, and disabled folks who all benefit over the public domain nature of Lovecraft’s works and (increasingly) his image.
Insofar as canceling Lovecraft is a tactic, it’s not one liable to work on Lovecraft…’cause he’s dead. If folks want to deal with Lovecraft’s racism they have to actually deal with his racism: through scholarship and engagement. Sometimes that means getting the image of the World Fantasy Award changed, sometimes that means writing a book — like Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom or N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became. Lovecraft isn’t just going to go away if you stop reading him, so you have to find more effective ways to deal with his legacy.
Obviously, there are many flawed people throughout history whose memories/influence have not been discarded — a good example might be Chaucer; while the extent of his crimes have been hotly debated, an often light-hearted treatment of rape is an undeniable part of his work, and acknowledging the author’s history adds a dimension to one’s reading of the text. What do you think of those who object to the canonization of ‘problematic’ individuals in literature? Is it even possible to knock an author off his pedestal once he has already had his influence on generations of readers and writers after him?
Weird fiction cannot afford too many saints. We have to accept the whole person, good and bad — and in Lovecraft’s case, that means that we acknowledge how incredibly generous he was with his time and encouragement to other writers, including Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, Robert Bloch, C. L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, James Blish, Fritz Leiber Jr., Donald Wandrei, and Donald Wollheim — and his views on race. Lovecraft was not perfect, his fiction is not perfect. To hold Lovecraft up as an impeccable icon is not something he would have wanted, and which the weird fiction community cannot afford. We celebrate his achievements, but we don’t want to emulate his prejudices. If weird fiction isn’t growing and changing, then it stagnates, and in a few years it will be a dead genre, like the railroad fiction magazines Lovecraft loved as a youth.
By the same token, Lovecraft’s longevity will continue as long as he stays fresh and relevant by influencing new generations of writers. While it might look like Lovecraft’s star wanes in some corners, it inspired new and strange fungal growths in others. That is why we’re still in the midst of a weird boom in Cthulhu Mythos media: fiction, art, games, movies, comic books, all sorts of stuff.
Given Lovecraft’s authorial role in the ‘original’ Lovecraft Mythos, and his continuing function as a ‘North Star’ and connective tissue for Lovecraftian stories, and the naming conventions presented in the text (‘Lovecraft Mythos,’ ‘Derleth Mythos’), what do you think the role of the author is within fiction, and worldbuilding? What do you think of The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes?
BD: The Death of the Author gets hideously misunderstood and misused by a lot of people. The ability to interpret a work outside of the context of the author’s life or intent is absolutely a tool in the critical toolbox, and an important one. There are a lot of people who have come into contact with some iteration or recension of Lovecrat’s original ideas which is so far removed from the source that they have no idea that it actually comes from him.
That’s natural. The shoggoth maids in Monster Girl Encyclopedia are one golden example. Huge explosion in fanart, fanfiction, and creativity — there are no doubt plenty of fans for whom this is the only version of the shoggoth they’ve ever encountered! Where ‘Death of the Author’ falls apart is when it is the only tool in the critical toolbox. If your baseline reaction to a work is “I reject your reality and substitute my own!” then that’s not really a critical interpretation, that’s just intellectual masturbation. I’m definitely of the school of reader and critic that thinks the author is an interesting figure in and of themself, and that the context of who wrote a piece, why, and how it was published and received are all part of furthering the understanding of that work. There are definitely times when you step outside of that box and say “Okay, Lovecraft probably never intended this but there’s a really interesting alternate reading of this text,” and that is especially important for new writers who want to take his concepts and play with them but don’t want the baggage that would come from trying to constrain themselves to what Lovecraft would have written.
Early in your book, you state: “inevitably, both the intention of the author and the conception of the reader must strike a balance, so that while all read the same words, readers come away with different understandings of what they mean and imply, but a few things can be objectively noted.” In your Deep Cuts post regarding Joan C. Stanley’s Ex Libris Miskatonici, you make reference to the concept of reader ‘exegesis.’ What, in your opinion, is the role of exegesis in fiction, worldbuilding, and specifically the Lovecraft Mythos?
BD: One of the key aspects of the Mythos as Lovecraft and his contemporaries first wrote it, and as the first fans experienced it, is reader interaction. Each story in the early Mythos stands on its own, but what sets it apart from other fiction of the era is the collaborative worldbuilding effort: the interactions between stories, the connections that can only be made by the readers. Lovecraft & co. basically made the first real shared universe, but not in the sense of there being any explicit canon. It was up to readers to put the pieces together, and not all of them would do it in the same way. If you look at Weird Tales July 1933 issue, there are three ‘Mythos’ stories in there — but they aren’t labeled as such. That freedom and ambiguity plays on human curiosity and pattern recognition — and that opens things up to works like Ex Libris Miskatonici, at once a love letter to fan-scholarship and an expansion of fanlore.
To borrow terms from the Sherlock Holmes fandom, that kind of framework can be considered ‘Watsonian’ — the effort is being made by fans to reconcile real or perceived inconsistencies in the stories, to use their intellects to push beyond the texts and make connections or read into and deepen the shared mythology. A more ‘Doylist’ approach is somewhat reductive: looking at the real-life inspirations and influences that went into the worldbuilding, and even admitting that sometimes Lovecraft & co. could flub up. They are related but distinct frameworks with which to approach both bodies of work, and it helps to keep both in mind — to be able to engage with fictional worlds on different levels and gain a deeper understanding of how the world was built and how it connects with other fictional works.It is not uncommon for Lovecraft’s work to be ‘reclaimed’ by artists and audiences he did not intend them for, who remove or critically engage with offensive elements in the previous work. This can be important culturally, for a critical awareness to seep into popular culture and allow it to come to terms with the author as an imperfect individual, as well as personally, for a fan trying to reconcile their complicated relationship with the text. But do such reclamations impact, retroactively, how we view Lovecraft the author? Does this honor Lovecraft by emphasizing the best parts of his work? Does it spite him by flouting his intent? Does it help to heal the wounds imparted by his hatred?
I don’t think it helps heal any wounds, necessarily, because not all the ‘reclamations’ are actually very good. When you look at something like Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country, for example, it’s a competent episodic novella (which has little to do about Lovecraft) which became a very well-done streaming television show (which has even less to do about Lovecraft); Lovecraft Country in all of its incarnations with its African-American cast feels like it should be a reflection on Lovecraft’s racial prejudices, providing some degree of insight or…not reparation, but an addressing of old sins. Yet the novel and the show are categorically disinterested in actually reflecting on Lovecraft’s prejudices as exemplified in his letters or fiction; they tackle more general prejudices of the United States in the 1950s. Even the one item they both include, Lovecraft’s poem On the Creation of… is just a short-hand, superficial accusation: the poem was not published until 1975, twenty years after the events of the story was set. Atticus could never have read it.
However, it can be cathartic. When N. K. Jemisin uses Lovecraft and the Mythos in her novel The City We Became, it is her way to express as a woman of color and a science fiction/fantasy fan how she feels about Lovecraft and some of the ideas in his work through the voices of her characters. That works. It plays a part in the story and it provides an outlet for those expressions. Jemisin uses Lovecraft while still acknowledging his flaws, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Aside from outright reclamation, there is a huge body of fan works that make up the overall Mythos. Could one say that Lovecraft is then only one participant in a collective work, and that his individual failings do not reflect necessarily on the rest of that work, which is extremely varied? Does the Mythos ‘belong’ to Lovecraft, as the originator, or does it ‘belong’ to all who have contributed to it over time?
You can’t own an idea. Writers often get into the weird mindset where we think we ‘own’ ideas. Yet at most all we ever own is the specific expression of an idea. Michael Moorcock doesn’t own the idea of magic swords, black swords, intelligent swords, sword-shaped demonic entities, or soul-sucking swords. When Moorcock created Stormbringer for his Elric novels, he was drawing off Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword, who was in turn drawing off the same myths and legends that Tolkien was drawing from when creating his legendarium (which, incidentally, is also why there are black swords in the Silmarillion). When Dungeons & Dragons came out with their Nine Lives Stealer sword, and Steven Brust created the morganti blades in his Dragaera novels, they were certainly borrowing ideas, but they were also participating in a tradition.
Which is really what writers are doing when they use the Cthulhu Mythos. Nothing they write belongs to Lovecraft; he certainly created many strange names and concepts like the Necronomicon and Cthulhu, both of which have proven very popular, but they are at the end of the day just names and ideas…and the stories have entered the public domain. Just because Lovecraft meant something or had a certain image in mind when he wrote Cthulhu doesn’t mean that is the only way it can and must be until the end of time. How boring would that be? Cthulhu can be many things to many different writers, and that is perfectly okay! Lovecraft wrote in one letter:
About the Necronomicon — I like to have other authors in the gang allude to it, for it helps work up a background of evil verisimilitude. I have worked it into certain things done for clients, & Klarkash-Ton, Long, Robert E. Howard, & Wandrei have also given it free advertising. In return, I am occasionally referring to Howard’s “Bran”, Smith’s “Tsathoggua”, Long’s “Tindalos” & “Chaugnar”, &c. Team-work, as it were.
— H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 14 Aug 1931
Lovecraft wasn’t dictating how other writers should use his material, any more than they were telling him how to use theirs. It was all a creative game for them, writing their own stories, participating as much or as little as they wanted to with the exchange of ideas. Because of that, we have the Cthulhu Mythos…and the game is still being played. You don’t have to wait for someone to say it’s your turn, and there are no hard rules; it’s all Calvinball. But it’s fun, and interesting, and that’s what’s important.
In the later pages of your book you discuss how August Derleth’s regular use of “the image of tentacles and octopoid-headed entities in his Mythos fiction (…) probably contributed to making tentacles a regular and recurring elements of Mythos entities makeup.” Do you think that this was purely for aesthetic reasons? Why did Derleth focus on tentacles?
BD: I think in part it’s because Derleth was very much into weird fiction — he wrote his thesis on the weird tale in English — and so he picked up on the appearance of tentacles in various works by writers like Arthur Machen, M. R. Jams, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard. I don’t think it was a failure of imagination on Derleth’s part. The real question might be: how much of that was conscious branding, versus Derleth just pursuing his own interpretation of Lovecraft’s aesthetic? I don’t know if there’s a good answer to that.
Did Derleth’s focus on tentacles contribute to the eponymous identification of the Mythos with Cthulhu? Is the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ and its mainstream aesthetics a product of Derleth, with the ‘Lovecraft Mythos’ being more a product of Lovecraft?
BD: ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ is a term effectively coined and popularized by Derleth; there are some references in Lovecraft and Derleth’s correspondence to “the mythology of Hastur” to talk about the ideas borrowed from Ambrose Bierce and Robert W. Chambers, but Lovecraft himself seems to have thought of his stories as ‘Yog-Sothothery’ or ‘the Arkham Cycle.’ It was Derleth (and fans such as Francis T. Laney and fan-scholars like Lin Carter) who really worked to popularize the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ as a general term not only for Lovecraft’s fiction but for all the fiction that was built around it and came after it.
Throughout your book, the terms ‘Lovecraft Mythos,’ ‘Cthulhu Mythos,’ and ‘Derleth Mythos,’ in a way which I understood to mean a different collections of works — effectively, different canons. In it, you provide a brief summary for the development of the ‘Mythoi,’ or the Cthulhu Mythos in its present form:
“There is no canon among the Mythos (…) most authors and fans are in tacit agreement in referring to the Lovecraft Mythos as a common source (…) [which is] little more than a connective tissue of shared background elements. Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard in particular did not, for the most part, set out to write “Mythos” fiction — they wrote their own fiction, which because they shared certain elements with Lovecraft, or that Lovecraft and those that followed him borrowed, became part of the Cthulhu Mythos. Later authors wrote more fiction that was about the Mythos, such as Derleth (…) or Lin Carter (…) as a consequence, many stories are part of the Mythos only for a single mention of a Lovecraftian tome or entity (…) There are also many works with no overt reference to the Mythos, but which nevertheless are indebted to Lovecraft — stories that borrow from the themes, concepts, material, even the use of a single Mythos name; I refer to these here as Lovecraftian stories.”
— Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos, 162–163
What, if any, do you think the utility is in being able to classify stories as pertaining to one genre, Mythos, or ‘world,’ over another? For the author trying to write in one, the reader trying to become acquainted with one, or the critic.
BD: After August Derleth’s death, there was real pushback against several of his conceptions, most notably in Richard L. Tierney’s The Derleth Mythos which became part of a ‘purist’ movement in Lovecraft studies and fiction. Scholars like S. T. Joshi worked hard to provide uncorrupted texts (i.e. those that were closest to what Lovecraft wrote and intended, before editors got ahold of them) and to re-assess Lovecraft’s work without the body of criticism, cataloguing, and fiction that had come after it. So that’s where you get the distinction between the ‘Lovecraft Mythos’ (i.e. just what Lovecraft wrote), versus the ‘Derleth Mythos’ (which includes not just Derleth’s stories, but his interpretations of Lovecraft’s Mythos), versus the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ (all Mythos stories by all writers, with Lovecraft and Derleth being subsets).
The distinctions serve different purposes. Many fans appreciate the purist mindset, because while it is reductionist it does provide a small but firm core of ‘canonical’ texts from which they can extrapolate relatively easily (and do). Separating out Derleth’s interpretations of Lovecraft’s fiction, and Derleth’s own fiction, greatly expands the possibility space. Some folks have taken this as a disparagement of Derleth’s fiction — and hey, not everybody’s a fan of Derleth — but I tend to think of it more like the group-of-interest hubs on the SCP-wiki: delineations which can make it easier to group and interpret parts of the Mythos based on what is ‘canon’ and which interpretations are being used.
Of course, if you just want to interpret it as weird fiction scholars having a shit-throwing contest, that’s not entirely inaccurate either! You don’t need to know whether a story is categorized as ‘Derleth Mythos’ or not to read and enjoy it, and possibly not to engage with it critically. It becomes more important at the meta-level of sifting stories into ‘canon’ or ‘non-canon,’ or differentiating between Lovecraft’s ideas and Derleth’s.
‘Lovecraft mythos’ is generally a much more strictly delineated term: only what Lovecraft wrote. Now, Lovecraft did not write in a vacuum, and he did borrow elements from his contemporaries (and vice versa), but generally when you hear someone talk about ‘Lovecraft Mythos,’ they mean very specifically the stories that Lovecraft had a direct hand in while he was alive, and not anything by Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Jr., August Derleth, etc. That is, anyway, what I mean when I use the term ‘Lovecraft Mythos.’
‘Lovecraftian’ is a much broader term. It can refer to anything that has to do with Lovecraft himself, or anything that represents the themes and philosophies of his work. It doesn’t have to include anything to do with the Mythos at all, which is part of the reason for why it has held on as a separate term, I think: you can have a film like Alien which tackles very Lovecraftian concepts but doesn’t even pay lip service to the Mythos, and that’s fine. If you’re picturing a Venn Diagram, the Cthulhu Mythos is a big circle, Lovecraftian is a big circle, and they overlap — and in that overlap is a smaller circle that is the Lovecraft Mythos. By contrast, you can have plenty of stories that use a lot of Mythos names, but the overall themes aren’t very Lovecraftian at all.
At one point in the book, you quote Ramsey Campbell stating that August Derleth cut out an instance of the word ‘shit’ in one of his pieces. He says that he still thinks “it’s what the character would have said, but I see that that may not be relevant to such a stylized form as Lovecraft pastiche.” Would it be fair to say that Arkham House, under Derleth, wanted “a stylized form of Lovecraft pastiche” from its authors? Did Derleth limit how far Mythos writers could ‘stray’ from H.P. Lovecraft?
BD: I don’t have vast insight into Derleth’s editorial practices in that regard. Derleth did try to limit the use of the Mythos by authors outside of those approved by Arkham House (cf. C. Hall Thompson), and he was aware, at least on some level, of branding and recognition. That being said, he also published Colin Wilson’s The Mind Parasites (1967) and The Return of the Lloigor which weren’t really pastiche, so I think he was sometimes open to more experimentation if it was someone he was familiar with. Certainly, a lot of Derleth’s own later stories like The Fisherman of Falcon’s Point and Innsmouth Clay vary considerably from what we’d normally consider a typical Mythos pastiche of that era. While I doubt he would have put it into so many words, I think Derleth defined the Cthulhu Mythos to be whatever he wanted it to be.
Then in 1971, August Derleth died. That really opened the floodgates: more people were writing Mythos stories, different kinds of people, and Arkham House lost its sort of central place and authority. People began to experiment with what a Mythos story could be. They still are. That is ultimately the fun of it: Lovecraft never tried to define his ‘Yog-Sothothery,’ so it’s an open sandbox for writers to play with. Everybody’s using the same sand, but they build things that are completely different.
However, it isn’t like Lovecraft was completely removed from unsavory elements in his fiction — although he did keep it mostly hidden, or implied. For example, do you think that the power imbalance in between Lavinia and Yog-Sothoth rules out the possibility that their sexual encounter was consensual? What makes this distinct from a workplace relationship in between a boss and their employee? Or to reduce the example further: in between a cosmic ‘master’ and ‘slave.’
BD: We never see Yog-Sothoth. Unlike some of the other weird entities that graced the pages of Weird Tales, their presence is completely off the page, and they don’t directly interact with any of the characters outside of the probable impregnation of Lavinia and the probably ascension of the Dunwich Horror at the very end. So characterizing the relationship in human terms is basically up in the air. Did Yog-Sothoth actually manifest tentacles and penetrate Lavinia Whateley sexually to impregnate her? Did they possess Wizard Whateley and impregnate her that way? Was it like a wasp implanting an egg parasitically into a host, or a botanist moving pollen from one plant to another? Or is Yog-Sothoth more like a cosmic force, with no conscious mind, that just being in its presence was enough to cause Lavinia’s body to spontaneously generate a pair of embryos. We don’t know! People sure have had a lot of fun writing about the different possibilities, though.
The problem with a lot of the ideas about the consensual or nonconsensual nature of the relationship is that it presumes some basis of normal human values — which Yog-Sothoth doesn’t appear to subscribe to since they aren’t human. Lavinia Whateley herself never comments on it in The Dunwich Horror, although she seems upset to be excluded from the rites, so that implies at least some level of consent in what goes on. Whether that’s informed consent or brainwashing from being raised in what amounts to a cult is another conversation.
On page 152 of your book, you mention that “a faceless perpetrator imposing sexual dominance on another” is “a clear enough analogy of a rapist.” Given this, and the power imbalance previously mentioned, do you think it is at all possible for human and non-humans to have consensual relationships in the Mythos? Are there any Mythos creatures which are not ‘faceless’ or ‘imposing,’ and which would not be able to hold inordinate power over their human partner(s)? In other words, are Mythos human and non-human relationships necessarily non-consensual via their power imbalance?
BD: In the Mythos as Lovecraft wrote it, issues of consent can be tricky. Lovecraft didn’t write bedroom scenes and doesn’t focus on sexual relationships to that degree. Most of the Mythos entities, like Cthulhu and the Elder Things in At the Mountains of Madness, are either effectively or explicitly asexual. There is definitely a strong implication in several cases (The Horror at Red Hook, The Curse of Yig, and the notes to The Shadow over Innsmouth) that women who engage in such sexual activity with Mythos entities were raped, and I think that’s commensurate with how Lovecraft would have perceived the relationships.
The case is murkier the more human-like the Mythos entities get. In The Shadow over Innsmouth, nobody can force you to take the third oath in the Esoteric Order of Dagon and marry a Deep One, but plenty of men have done just that. In The Mound, T’la-Yub definitely looks to be pursuing a mutually consensual sexual relationship with her conquistador paramour. Asenath Waite and Edward Derby in The Thing on the Doorstep are never explicitly said to have marital relations, but if they did then there could definitely be some consent issues in play given the power imbalance in the relationship.
Outside of Lovecraft’s fiction, the whole spectrum of relationships is in play. Robert E. Howard in The Slithering Shadow Thog has a faceless tentacle monster who is a personification of rape; in Worms of the Earth the half-human Atla very much makes the most of her opportunity to demand sex from Bran Mak Morn, but the nature of their relationship is purely transactional — no one is raping anyone else, no one holds more power over the other.
Since the writing of your book, The Shape of Water by Guillermo del Toro has made a big splash in the cinemas. Could you give us a brief review of the movie, if you have seen it? Do you think it merely extended the existing lines of thought in Lovecraftian erotica, or did it contribute new elements to the corpus?
BD: I have seen The Shape of Water, although not during its theatrical run. I think Cody Goodfellow jokingly referred to it as Grinding Nemo during the prayer breakfast at NecronomiCon 2019, which is probably a bit unfair, but there’s definitely that popular notion of it as a sort R-rated contemporary take on The Creature from the Black Lagoon rather than The Shadow over Innsmouth. Someone better-versed in cinema than me could easily do an entire film class on it, but if I had to review the film briefly — The Shape of Water is basically the exact sexual inverse of Alien. Lovecraftian, but not rapacious; full of sexual imagery, but without any sense of violation from the nonhuman character. All the ugliness is from the normal people, stuck in their ugly little prudish mindsets, and that is very Lovecraftian when you think about it. Probably the most positive take of teratophilia that I can remember. If I ever write a revised and expanded version of Sex, I would need to include an entry.
What effect has American copyright law had on the development of the Cthulhu Mythos, as made distinct from the Lovecraft or Derleth Mythos? Would it be accurate to say that many of the later Lovecraftian works are still under copyright, producing a ‘Mickey Mouse’-like effect where weird authors can only dip their pens inside the ink well of what is currently in the public domain?
BD: This is complicated, but the gist is: pretty much all of the fiction published during Lovecraft’s life is in the public domain, in the United States and other countries. Some-but-not-all of the fiction by his co-creators like Robert E. Howard is likewise in the public domain, but trying to figure out exactly what can sometimes be a rigorous process. Most of the later works were copyrighted and/or haven’t fallen into the public domain yet.
The availability of Lovecraft’s works in the public domain has massively influenced their use by later generations of writers; this is true to a lesser extent for his contemporaries as well. Robert E. Howard’s literary legacy, for example, was inherited by his father Dr. Isaac M. Howard and after his death shepherded by a number of heirs, and is now being developed by Cabinet Entertainment — which is why you don’t see as much Hyborian Age fanfiction as you do Cthulhu Mythos fanfiction, but there are plenty of Conan comic books and things.
There is still some borrowing, but it usually involves either some gentleperson’s agreement (Brian Lumley has been famously generous with letting writers use his Chthonians, asking only that they leave his human characters alone), something so small as to be almost unnoticeable (like the use of shoggothim as the plural for ‘shoggoth’), or ideas just spreading too far and fast for litigation to possibly keep up, like the unlicensed use of the gate sigil from the cover of the Simon Necronomicon in many comic books, works of fan art, pieces of jewelry, t-shirts, etc. So the Mythos continues to ‘grow,’ but for those concerned about copyright, you don’t normally see somebody try to write and publish, say, an unauthorized sequel to Charles Stross’ The Atrocity Archives.
I have seen debate regarding whether The Color Out of Space should be included within the ‘Cthulhu Mythos,’ or the ‘Lovecraft Mythos.’ Some separate it from the main ‘trunk’ of the tree much like the ‘Dream Quest Cycle.’ What is the origin of this partition, and is it a justified one?
BD: The Colour Out of Space is definitely part of Lovecraft’s ‘Arkham cycle.’ Like The Picture in the House it is largely separate from the other interconnected aspects of his artificial mythology — and that’s okay. It doesn’t all have to be one big narrative. It can be — Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows worked both stories into the background and plot of Providence — but part of the joy of a traditional mythology is that you get these narrative traditions that don’t always align perfectly, with regional variations and contradictions and some stuff that just seems tacked on out of nowhere — and that’s fine. It’s okay. I’d definitely count The Colour Out of Space as part of the Lovecraft Mythos because Lovecraft wrote it; because of that, many writers have incorporated it into their stories written in the wider Cthulhu Mythos.
What is the difference in between a ‘Mythos’ and a ‘world?’ Is it a conceptual one, or are they two different words for the same meaning?
BD: I would define them as two different things. A world is a setting. A mythos is a body of interconnected stories and ideas. The concept gets confused because for most people, a mythos can define a setting, or be inextricable from it. We don’t normally think of Lovecraft’s stories as ‘Weird New Englander’ tales as a sort of Atlantic coast equivalent to ‘Weird Westerns.’ Yet at the same time, the Cthulhu Mythos is completely setting agnostic. A space ship can run across Azathoth in the void, a cyborg in a cyberpunk future can run across a copy of the Necronomicon, a crusader can run afoul of a cult of Shub-Niggurath. The Cthulhu Mythos lends itself to this kind of literary injoke very easily: in Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead, there’s a reference to the Necronomicon. The HAL 9000 in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Programming Manual for the HAL 9000 Computer: Revised Edition was published by Miskatonic University Press.
Is there an anthropological, sociological, or religious study on the Lovecraftian Occult? Are there any known centers of worship other than Providence, or Salem? Are there any works on its historical development?
BD: There is The Necronomicon Files by Daniel Harms and John W. Gonce III; I wouldn’t really recommend any other book. A few other people have tried writing books on the Lovecratian occult, but more of them aren’t worth reading — Peter Levenda, Donald Tyson, and Matt Steadman are all flavors of bunk, bad writing, bad scholarship, and often all three at once. There have been a few more scholarly/academic takes, but they tend to be stuck in obscure journals. From an occult community standpoint Lovecraftian materials are very widely available (the Simon Necronomicon has never been out of print since it hit paperback, as far as I’m aware), but the actual body of folks that are serious about Lovecraftian occultism is and always has been rather small and splintered. That makes it hard to track the historical development other than through what publications can be tracked down: the Typhonian Trilogies by Kenneth Grant, for example, can’t be taken at face value as serious history but were very influential on many later magicians. It’s easy to get lost in the weeds on this sort of thing; Dave Evans’ The History of British Magick After Crowley for example hits on a few points, but it’s not the whole story.
If you would like to find more of Bobby Derie’s work, you can follow him at deepcuts.blog. He is currently working on Strange Stories of Robert E. Howard & Others, and can be reached via ancient0history@gmail.com.
